“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Ortiz said. “I don’t got no intention of harming nobody.”
Ortiz said that he had been drunk on the night in question. The plan had been to go to a club, but Ortiz had crashed at Aaron’s Franklin apartment instead.
“That’s a lie,” Moran told him. “I’m not disrespecting you. That’s an absolute lie.”
“Honest,” Ortiz finally said. “I don’t want to be involved in this bullshit.”
“We don’t want you to be involved in this, but you are,” Moran told him.
Ortiz became agitated. He had so much on his plate, he said. He had four children to take care of.
“And that’s how upset you got when you figured out what was going on,” Elliott told him. “We understand that.”
The police showed Ortiz the surveillance footage they had. There he was—Ortiz could see himself clearly—with Wallace and Hernandez at the gas station that they had stopped at before picking Lloyd up in Boston.
“I know you want out of this,” Moran said. “I know you want to get out of it, but you can’t. But you know something. We don’t think you did it…You’re a good person…You want to get help. You want to do better…But why the fuck did [Hernandez] do this? Why did he drag you in? Why did he drag you in?”
“Why is he leaving you out to dry?” Elliott added.
“Probably because I’m the only one with a good heart.”
“Exactly,” said Elliott.
The interrogation started at two in the afternoon. It went straight through into the evening.
“You know what I’m scared of?” Moran asked Ortiz. “I’m scared of this guy TL, because guess what?…I was scared that they would put one in you and dump you someplace. That’s what my fear was. So you’re out of the way, you’re shot, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, it must have been that kid. He’s gone. He disappeared.’ And you’re lying in some fucking swamp.”
“All this is a fucking joke,” Ortiz said.
“You know it’s a joke,” said Moran. “Except for this poor bastard who was killed five times.”
Finally, Elliott and Moran got Ortiz to admit that he was in the Altima—asleep, he said. Then, he had heard shots. Ortiz was “shocked,” he explained. “Hypnotized.”
Ortiz said that he’d never gotten out of the car.
The cops had not given Ortiz anything to eat. Mentally and physically, he was exhausted. But the interrogation was not over yet. Elliott and Moran pressed for a polygraph test.
“How about you do them a polygraph?” Ortiz asked, referring to Hernandez and Wallace.
“What them?” said Moran. “We don’t care about them. I mean, I don’t care what they say.”
Chapter 65
Nine hours into the interrogation, Carlos Ortiz submitted to the polygraph test.
When it was done, the test administrator asked Ortiz how he felt about it.
“I think I did good,” Ortiz said.
“You think you did good?”
“Yup.”
“Excellent,” the administrator said.
“How do you think I did?”
“I already know how you did. I already know. It’s pretty clear: you lied.”
“What?” Ortiz sputtered.
“You lied.”
“Oh.”
“You lied,” the administrator said. “Right now, you’ve got a small window of opportunity to help yourself out. It’s as simple as that, okay? You know you lied, okay? I’m here to help you out. I want to do what I can, okay? I really do. But I’m not into playing games and doing all this stuff. I’m just straight up with you. You know you lied. Tell me the real story and let’s go from there.”
“Hmmm?” Ortiz said.
“There is no ‘hmmm.’”
“I didn’t get out of the car. I opened the door. I didn’t get out of the car.”
The administrator was not buying any of it.
“Carlos, you can say that all you want…You are lying.”
“What you want me to tell you?”
“I want you to tell me the truth because that’s not the truth, all right? We can help each other out here. You can be honest about this whole thing. Carlos, tell me what really happened that night, ’cause you are not. You are trying to be a little…”
“Listen, listen, I mean, I didn’t see what happened. I mean, I seen when everybody got out, you know. I never got out. I was about opening the door and that’s when I heard the gunshot.”
“Okay. What did you see?”
“Aaron was, like, towards, like, the car, like, towards behind, like. They took a little walk. I didn’t hear no arguing. Nothing. And it just happened like this, like, you know. So that’s what I really seen. But I remember Aaron—as soon I went like this, I see Aaron run in the car, okay, and Bo slam the door.”
“All right. Here is the problem, okay, because that’s very similar to what you’ve told me before. You failed the exam as far as being out of the car. You failed the exam, okay? You failed the exam all around. You failed it. All right.”
“Yeah, but I was nervous. I’m nervous right now.”
“You’re nervous now, because now I know that you know more.”
“No, I was nervous right there, too.”
“No, Carlos. Right before all this, we sat here, and we talked, and we said if you had done something, if you were there…”
“I never—I never—I’ve been doing good—I’ve been telling you, I never—I didn’t get out of the car. I never got out of the car ’cause I remember I never got out of the car. Bo was still right there. He and Aaron took a walk, whatever.”
“So maybe what the problem is…here is what the problem is…”
“I never got out of the car.”
“I’m trying to give you a chance to give some truth to this, okay? If you didn’t get out of the car, the only real possibility of you failing this exam—”
“Nervous.”
“Listen to me, nervousness has nothing to do with it, nothing, all right?”
“I’m scared. I’m scared.”
“Look at me, Carlos. Here is what happened: You saw Aaron shoot him.”
Ortiz said, “No.” But he was inching his way toward a more believable story.
“I’m willing to do—like, help, anything, like,” he said. “I want to cooperate, like, work with you. Like, I’m—like this is—call me a snitch. Call me what the fuck you want. I’m willing to tell you what I know.”
“Carlos, you have been put into an awful, awful situation.”
Ortiz had agreed to a DNA swab. During the polygraph test he had also been asked: “Did you shoot O?” “Did you shoot O that day?” and “Did you get out of the car when O was shot?”
His answers had been categorized as “deception indicated.”
Then, Ortiz had changed his story: he had opened the door, he explained, but he had not stepped out of the car.
It was too dark to see Hernandez shoot Lloyd.
But right after hearing the gunshots, Ortiz said, he had watched Aaron run back to the car, cradling the gun in his hand.
Chapter 66
It was so stupid,” says an officer who took part in the investigation. “If Hernandez had shot Lloyd in Dorchester, or even in Plainville. If he’d done it in the club’s parking garage, he would have gotten away with it. Think about it: Hernandez left the shell casings there, by the body, for us to collect. A few days later, we were collecting evidence from a dumpster. The casing that came out of his car was a perfect match. Same firing pin and everything. People would say, ‘How did that shell casing get in the car? He must have shot Lloyd in the car.’ Well, he didn’t shoot Lloyd in the car. Hernandez was so freaking crazy, he pulled out of the clearing and drove down the street shooting at street signs. He was so stoned, so drunk. Just out of his mind.”
Hernandez was also famous, and rich, with access to excellent lawyers. The case against him needed to be bulletproof.
By Wednesday morning, the police were convinced that it was.
Wesley Lowery was checking Twitter in his third-floor walk-up apartment in Allston when he saw the news: Jenny Wilson, a Hartford Courant reporter, had been on an overnight stakeout of Hernandez’s house. She was reporting that the Patriot had just been arrested.